The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (35 page)

Their relationship having cooled by 1927, Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West through a “biography” that would include Sackville family history. She solved biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando, who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of
time. Thus,
Orlando: A Biography
(1928) exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions.

In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told Woolf that one of her memoirs represented her best writing. Afterward she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In
A Room of One's Own
(1929), Woolf blamed women's absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty. For her 1931 talk
Professions for Women
, Woolf studied the history of women's education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society.

Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa Bell's paintings for their wordlessness, Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be similarly impersonal and abstract. In
The Waves
(1931), poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk.
The Waves
offers a six-sided shape that illustrates how each individual experiences events uniquely. Through
To the Lighthouse
and
The Waves
, Woolf became, with James Joyce and William Faulkner, one of the three major English-language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing.

Even before finishing
The Waves
, she began compiling a scrapbook of clippings illustrating the horrors of war, the threat of fascism, and the oppression of women. The discrimination against women that Woolf had discussed in
A Room of One's Own
and
Professions for Women
inspired her to plan a book that would trace the story of a fictional family named Pargiter and explain the social conditions affecting family members over a period of time. In
The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay
she would alternate between sections of fiction and of fact. The task of doing so, however, was daunting.

Woolf took a holiday from
The Pargiters
to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Flush
(1933) remains both a biographical satire and a lighthearted exploration of perception, in this case a dog's. But she feared she would never finish
The Pargiters
. She solved this dilemma by jettisoning the essay sections, keeping the family narrative, and renaming her book
The Years
. She narrated 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism, and the threat of another war. Though (or perhaps because) Woolf's trimming muted the book's radicalism,
The Years
(1937) became a best-seller.

Woolf's chief anodyne against Adolf Hitler, World War II, and her own despair was writing. During the bombing of London in 1940 and 1941, she worked on
Between the Acts
. In her novel, war threatens art and humanity itself. Despite
Between the Acts
' affirmation of the value of art, Woolf worried that this novel was “too slight” and indeed that all writing was irrelevant when England seemed on the verge of invasion and civilization about to slide over a precipice. Facing such horrors, a depressed Woolf found herself unable to write. On March 28, 1941, she walked behind Monk's House and down to the River Ouse, put stones in her pockets, and drowned herself.
Between the Acts
was published posthumously later that year.

(b. Feb. 2, 1882, Dublin, Ire.—d. Jan. 13, 1941, Zürich, Switz.)

J
ames Joyce was an Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as
Ulysses
(1922) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939).

Joyce was educated at University College, Dublin, which was then staffed by Jesuit priests. There he studied languages and reserved his energies for extracurricular activities, reading widely—particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits—and taking an active part in the college's Literary and Historical Society. Early success in publishing a theatre review confirmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family, friends, and teachers that the resolution was justified. He received a B.A. in 1902. To support himself while writing, he decided to become a doctor, but, after attending a few lectures in Dublin, he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris, where he abandoned the idea of medical studies, wrote some book reviews, and studied in the Sainte-Geneviève Library.

By 1903 he had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel,
Stephen Hero
, based on the events of his own life, when in 1904 George Russell offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers' magazine,
The Irish Homestead
. In response Joyce began writing the stories published as
Dubliners
(1914). Three stories,
The Sisters
,
Eveline
, and
After the Race
, had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus before the editor decided that Joyce's work was not suitable for his readers. Meanwhile Joyce had met a girl named Nora Barnacle, with whom he fell in love on June 16, the day that he chose as what is known as “Bloomsday” (the day of his novel
Ulysses
). Eventually he persuaded her to leave Ireland with him, although he refused, on principle, to go through a ceremony of marriage.

Joyce and Barnacle left Dublin together in October 1904. Joyce obtained a position in the Berlitz School, Pola, Austria-Hungary, working in his spare time at his novel and short stories. In 1905 they moved to Trieste. In
1906–07, for eight months, he worked at a bank in Rome, disliking almost everything he saw. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the Realists; his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements. He decided that
Stephen Hero
lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as “a work in five chapters” under a title—
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
—intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central figure.

After the outbreak of World War I, Joyce's financial difficulties were great. He was helped by a large grant from Edith Rockefeller McCormick and finally by a series of grants from Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of the
Egoist
magazine, which by 1930 had amounted to more than £23,000. Her generosity resulted partly from her admiration for his work and partly from her sympathy with his difficulties, for, as well as poverty, he had to contend with eye diseases that never really left him. From February 1917 until 1930 he endured a series of 25 operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, sometimes being for short intervals totally blind. Despite this he kept up his spirits and continued working, some of his most joyful passages being composed when his health was at its worst.

Unable to find an English printer willing to set up
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
for book publication, Weaver published it herself, having the sheets printed in the United States, where it was also published in 1916. Encouraged by the acclaim given to this, in March 1918, the American
Little Review
began to publish episodes from
Ulysses
, continuing until the work was banned in December 1920. An autobiographical novel,
A Portrait of the Artist
traces the intellectual and emotional development of a young man named Stephen Dedalus and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art.

After World War I, Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, and then, at the invitation of Ezra Pound, he went to Paris in July 1920. His novel
Ulysses
was published there on Feb. 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company. Already well known because of the censorship troubles, it became immediately famous upon publication.
Ulysses
is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer's
Odyssey
. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce's earlier
Portrait of the Artist
); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser; and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. By the use of interior monologue Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.

In Paris Joyce worked on
Finnegans Wake
, the title of which was kept secret, the novel being known simply as “Work in Progress” until it was published in its entirety in May 1939. In addition to his chronic eye troubles, Joyce suffered great and prolonged anxiety over his daughter's mental health. What had seemed her slight eccentricity grew into unmistakable and sometimes violent mental disorder that Joyce tried by every possible means to cure, but it became necessary finally to place her in a mental hospital near Paris. In 1931 he and Barnacle visited London, where they were married, his scruples on this point having yielded to his daughter's complaints.

Meanwhile he wrote and rewrote sections of
Finnegans Wake
; often a passage was revised more than a dozen times before he was satisfied. Basically the book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod, near Dublin, his wife, and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker (often designated by variations on his initials, HCE, one form of which is “Here Comes Everybody”), Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle, Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel are every family of mankind, the archetypal family about whom all humanity is dreaming. It is thousands of dreams in one. Languages merge: Anna Livia has “vlossyhair”—
w
ł
osy
being Polish for “hair”; “a bad of wind” blows,
bâd
being Turkish for “wind.” Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear as “the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators” dream on. And throughout the book Joyce himself is present, joking, mocking his critics, defending his theories, remembering his father, enjoying himself.

After the fall of France in World War II (1940), Joyce took his family back to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception given to his last book.

(b. July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—d. June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria)

F
ranz Kafka was a German-language writer of visionary fiction, whose posthumously published novels—especially
Der Prozess
(1925;
The Trial
) and
Das Schloss
(1926;
The Castle
)—express the anxieties and alienation of 20th-century humankind.

The son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community, Kafka was German both in language and culture. He was a timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers. Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the
authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages.

Kafka's opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I), and in his later years he showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka's lifelong personal unhappiness. Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German-Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod; this minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka's friends, and eventually he emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka's writings and as his most influential biographer.